Unmanned aircraft or aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide enhanced and economical access to areas where manned flight operations are unacceptably costly and/or dangerous. For example, unmanned aircraft outfitted with remotely controlled cameras can perform a wide variety of surveillance missions, including spotting schools of fish for the fisheries industry, monitoring weather conditions, providing border patrols for national governments, and providing military surveillance before, during, and/or after military operations.
Existing techniques for controlling unmanned aircraft systems suffer from a variety of drawbacks. For example, existing unmanned aircraft systems (which can include the aircraft itself along with control devices, launch devices, recovery devices, and storage methods) are typically controlled using either direct RF communication or satellite communication. Direct RF-based control is limited by its short range and high power requirements. It also requires specialized equipment at both the UAV and the ground control station.
While controlling UAVs by satellite may allow for longer-range communications when compared with direct RF-based control, satellite control is typically limited by low bandwidth and low data rate limits. An example of a satellite-based control technique used in the past is Iridium. Iridium is a low-orbit satellite communications system that provides a long-range data connection at a rate of ˜2.4 k bits per second. Not only does control by satellite have the drawback of limited bandwidth and low data rate, it also, like direct RF, typically involves high power requirements, high cost, and specialized equipment (e.g., relay stations and large dishes for transmit/receive).